He thinks that the Earth's interior was cold before the fludde, and was heated by accelerated radioactive decay during and after the fludde. Never mind all the issues with accelerated radioactive decay and the evidence we have of radioactive decay rates being constant for many billions of years.

I'm not an expert in this field, but it seems pretty obvious than the length of convergent plate margins is more relevant than the length of trenches. I also note that the above-quoted numbers were published before your source, and yet your source didn't mention these often-referenced sources. So, based on this evidence, I'm going to conclude that your source is a crank.

Unlike, of course, your refusal to address the seismic tomography evidence I posted. There's data there, no matter how it's presented, and it cries out for explanation.

I was going to write a long critique of Mr. Pratt (an interesting name in itself...), but will keep it short.

There is a school of thought that likes to attribute most of what we see in the rock record as related to vertical tectnics. That would mean that horizontal movements are not as important in explaining where the continents are, etc. However, for the most part, this has been discredited.

They are largely anomaly hunters who attempt to find the 'unexplainable', and thereby show that Plate Tectonics is wrong. They hand wave away any PT explanations as ad hoc or somehow too complex to be taken seriously.

However, Pratt is not the typical VT guy who stubbornly clings to old ideas. He is motivated mainly by adherence to religious myth. He understands that Plate Tectonics is actually too powerful in explaining what has happened on earth and that it contradicts much of his mythology. To him that is not acceptable.

By his own description, he is educated in the 'technical sciences'. What the heck does that mean? Why couldn't he say, 'Geology' and/or 'Biology', and/or 'Astronomy' or 'Physics'? I get the strongest impression that Mr. Pratt is actually hiding his lack of training from you...

quote:"Initially, during the Late Jurassic, continued rifting widened the Gulf of Mexico and progressed to the point that sea-floor spreading and formation of oceanic crust occurred. At this point, sufficient circulation with the Atlantic Ocean was established that the deposition of Louann Salt ceased.[5][7][9][10]"

The history of the gulf did not begin until the Triassic when continental crust was uplifted, rifted, eroded and subsided, followed by seafloor spreading.

This is exactly as Plate Tectonics would predict. The continental crust in the Gulf of Mexico thins and disappears toward the center of the basin.

This is not an example of simple subsidence of a continental crustal block.

Are you telling me since there is enough water in the Earth to fill our present oceans 7 to 10 times there could not have been enough water stored in the Earth to cause Noah's flood?

Are you telling me that you have not read any of our posts on this? That is not available water.

You cannot simply push it to the surface.

And then, at the whim of a supernatural being, push it back.

Do you have a reading problem?

Only with your posts, it seems.

How could water flow into something that had ceased to exist as a cavern and became a hole.

If a hole was formed, why didn't the water simply flow into it?

The water could fill the hole that had been created by the colapse of the overburden over the cavern.

So you need to puncture this reservoir, global in extent (even though you only have continental shelves to work with), let the water rush out to destroy all life on earth. Then you have this void sitting there in the reservoir you just undermined for the water to go back into.

Then you need to soak it all up into the mantle to form the asthenosphere.

Right...

Under 2,000 to 25,000 feet of water around the world. They are called sumerged continents.

So you take water out of these submerged continents which are really caverns. Then, it rolls, against gravity up onto the emergent continents, destroys all life and then goes back into the caverns (which are actually small compared to the surface area of the earth) and then disappears, so that you have no actual evidence of huge caverns...

There is you just don't accept it.

Well, finding us these caverns, which look like continental crust, would provide some evidence in your favor. What is your other evidence?

There is no argumentation above in your post that shows that what I have presented is an impossibility.

In dream land, I suppose anything is possible. How about providing some kind of evidence for collapsed caverns or maybe a location for some fountains of the deep.

So you are moving water from the crust to the surface. How does that raise sea level? What takes the place of the water? And why would the water go back?

ICANT's model is preposterous, but it is not, I think, what you seem to be understanding.

I believe he is saying that the water that was on Earth (plus some brought by comets) was buried by the rock from comets and asteroids. As this dirt built up, the pressure from the added dirt forced the water towards the surface.

When it reached the surface, it flooded the planet. Then, where the water had been (under the surface) collapsed, creating depressions that the water flowed into making the oceans we have now.

This model doesn't work, but it doesn't argue that water was in a cavern underground, spontaneously left the caverns to flood the planet, then returned to the caverns.

ICANT's model is preposterous, but it is not, I think, what you seem to be understanding.

Well, it is pretty convoluted. Trying to make sense of it was probably a mistake.

I believe he is saying that the water that was on Earth (plus some brought by comets) was buried by the rock from comets and asteroids. As this dirt built up, the pressure from the added dirt forced the water towards the surface.

Do you read this as a world without oceans? Simple dewatering of buried sediments does not raise sea level.

This is just one of the things that is confusing me. If his source of water is crustal (i.e. mostly below sea level) it should not raise sea level at all.

Furthermore, his source seems to be continental. In that case there is hardly enough submergent continental rocks to supply a global flood. But that's kind of beside the point, I guess...

Do you read this as a world without oceans? Simple dewatering of buried sediments does not raise sea level.

I think, and this is only by trying to peice together things he's said on other threads and such, that at first the earth was all water. Then land was created in one area, either by god, or maybe through ICANT's bombardment model.

Then, bombardment continued, creating mroe land and burying more and more water, until, I assume, there was no surface water left, it was all buried, sort of like the water table. (You dig down, you get water.) As this dirt and rock built up, the pressure, somehow, forced the water back to the surface, but the dirt didn't immediately compact or "fill in the gaps" which doesn't seem to make sense from a pressure point of view.

Then, after the flood had covered the land, the dirt finally compacted in areas, filling in the space that had been occupied by water, creating the seas and rivers and lakes and such, where the water pooled, allowing other areas to remain dirt.

Of course, I don't understand why the dirt didn't compact everywhere, leading to a continuously flooded earth...unless bombardment continued, building up yet another layer of dirt...but somehow allowing people to survive.

And I'm having a hell of a time visualizing the Late Heavy Bombardment squishing trees and dinosaurs and moss into coal and oil instead of vaporizing it all.....

Not sure who said that, but the answer is the trees and dinosaurs and moss would be ripped into tiny shreds that eventually turned into kerogen. It would only be vaporized if it remained on the surface of a surface that was not broken into pieces already. What probably happened was that after just a few large and scattered meteorite hits, the thin crust was fragmented into thousands of spain sized microcontinents that each had no foundation. Each of these microcontinents probably sank 3 or 4 miles through the subterannean water only to be smashed into further bit by the rest of the late heavy bombardment.

Are you proposing this to explain where the water for the flood came from?

Don't forget that the water began rising 7 days before the rain started and I believe Noah got on board during this time. You'd think he'd notice the bombardment and shattering of the crust and Moses would have given it a mention when he recorded the tale.

What sort of physical evidence would you expect if your idea is correct?

Yes, this is where the water for the flood came from---under the ground, but also from outer space. He did notice the bombardment. He said the gates of heaven were open for 150 days. He did notice the shattering of the crust as well. He said the fountains of the deep were opened up. All of this was mentioned. They just didn't have terms like crust and bombardment and meteorites in the hebrew of the bronze age.

What sort of physical evidence would I expect? The geological history we see in the record today is what I would expect. There is no solid boulder around today that has been dated later than 3.9 billion years ago. All rocks that were formed near this time were all formed in the presence of water. The massive archean and proterozoic amounts of metamorphosed sediment and massive amounts of metamorphosed basalt testify to reformation after a violent destructive period.

I thought plate tectonics was part of your model, now you're supporting your arguments with reference to someone who denies it?

About the Journal of Scientific Exploration:

the journal was initially established to provide a forum for three main fields that had largely been neglected by mainstream science: ufology, cryptozoology, and parapsychology. It has also published research articles, essays, and book reviews on many other topics, including the philosophy of science, pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact, alternative medicine, the process of peer review for controversial topics,[3] astrology, consciousness, reincarnation, minority opinion scientific theories, and paranormal phenomena.

Now I'm not saying that anything published there is necessarily wrong, but I would say that you'd take pretty much everything else they'd publish with a grain of salt.

To test the accuracy of the paper I chose one claim at random, concerning Indian endemic fauna --- this is the first thing I tried, so if I am guilty of cherry-picking it is entirely by accident. Your author, Pratt, writes as follows:

There is, however, overwhelming geological and paleontological evidence that India has been an integral part of Asia since Proterozoic or earlier time (Chatterjee and Hotton, 1986; Ahmad, 1990; Saxena and Gupta, 1990; Meyerhoff et al., 1991). [...] If the long journey of India had actually occurred, it would have been an isolated island-continent for millions of years – sufficient time to have evolved a highly distinct endemic fauna. However, the Mesozoic and Tertiary faunas show no such endemism, but indicate instead that India lay very close to Asia throughout this period, and not to Australia and Antarctica (Chatterjee and Hotton, 1986).

Note the two references to Chatterjee and Hotton.

Now, the trouble with all this is that the opponents of the "isolated India" model do not claim that the Cretaceous Indian fauna resemble Asian fauna, but that they resemble African and Madagascan fauna, e.g. Sahni:

At the generic and familial level there is a close correspondence between the Cretaceous vertebrates of peninsular India, Africa, and Madagascar.

Instead, we find that almost all Indian taxa were possessed in common with other continents. As time went on, the northern relationships became stronger and the southern ones weaker. Most of the recent geophysical accounts show India not making contact with Eurasia until the early Miocene, but fossil materials show that this event must have taken place by the early Eocene.

That is, the early lack of endemicism must be due to close contact with Gondwanan and not Laurasian fauna.

(A charitable view of Pratt is that he has got two arguments of the anti-isolationists mixed up: they claim a prolonged proximity to Africa and a subsequent early union with Asia as two successive mechanisms for lack of endemicism.)

As a result of these observations on fauna, specifically those of Sahni quoted above, Chatterjee and Hotton maintain, not that India was never detached from Asia, but that it spent much of the Cretaceous not far from Africa.

And yet Pratt cites them as showing that "India has been an integral part of Asia" since the Proterozoic --- when they never said so, when they never mentioned the position of Indian in the Proterozoic, and when the evidence which led them to their new model was the resemblance of early Cretaceous Indian fauna to Cretaceous African/Madagascan fauna, which is why they put India closer to Africa than had previously been thought.

So Pratt is taking a minor disagreement about the precise route of drift and parlaying it into "overwhelming evidence" that India was attached to Asia since the Proterozoic when that is not in the least what the evidence suggests, nor the conclusion of the authors that he cites.

I have not the patience to look at all of Pratt's claims, but if this random sample is at all typical of his method then I don't think that they bear much weight.